Wow, This Guy Really Loves His Wife
Over a year ago, comedian and wife guy Alec Robbins released his smash hit comic Mr Boop, where he tells the factual tale of his life being married to Betty Boop – yes, that Betty Boop. A new panel was released daily, and in a pandemic haze, I was obsessed. Each day we’d wait with bated breath for a new issue. Did he still love his wife? Oh, thank goodness, he did. What started off as a silly comic about a guy who was really into his wife turned into a feminist horror about narratives, control and expectations.
Why Betty Boop?
Before looking at how much she is loved by her husband, Alec Robbins, let’s have a look at Betty Boop. Created in the 1930s by Max Fleischer and Grim Natwick, Boop, much like previous female animated characters, was created as a love interest to a male protagonist.
Talkartoons was created as a response to the increasingly popular animated shorts that Walt Disney was launching, and Bimbo the dog soon became its central character. Betty first appeared in the short Dizzy Dishes, as an anthropomorphic French Poodle, who is performing at a Jazz Bar and catches the romantic interest of Bimbo. Within a year, she stole the spotlight, becoming the star of the show, and transforming into a fully human character. Her design was based on flapper icons like Helen Kane, Esther Jones, and Clara Bow, and compared to the demure Minnie Mouse, her design was positively risque.
The original very sexy baby, wearing tiny dresses, sheer robes and garters, Betty Boop was created as a direct response to the modern flapper girls who flouted societal and sexual norms. She listened to jazz, she drove, she danced; Betty Boop was the modern woman trying to stay in charge of herself and her sexuality. While the lasting image of Betty is that of a very sexy baby living the flapper lifestyle in the ’20s, the 1930s comics actually dealt with more mature, depressing realities of life. Betty Boop nearly gets evicted, and her landlord sexually accosts her in lieu of demanding rent. Betty Boop gets a job at the circus and her boss threatens to fire her if she doesn’t put out.
Following the introduction of the Hays Code in the mid-’30s, which aimed to clean up Hollywood and make it more family-friendly, Betty Boop’s outfits became a bit more demure, and the cartoons became a bit less trippy. Now, Betty Boop was a housewife or a career girl with respectable hemlines and fewer curls in her hair (because as we all know, curly-haired girls are massive sluts). Now that Betty was a respectable young woman, her popularity declined. The Fleischer cartoons were heralded for their risqué and psychedelic atmosphere compared to Disney cartoons – without this added edge, what was the point?
The lasting image of Betty is still a sex symbol, if not a slightly kitsch one. Betty Boop can be bought in every seaside town in the world, as lighters, lamps, coasters, cufflinks – her image is objectively tacky. In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, she appears as a fading star; she’s now a cigarette girl who has to show people that she’s “still got it”, while the hot new star Jessica Rabbit performs.
Despite being created as a love interest for the protagonist, her lasting image is untied to any male counterparts. Her image is largely voiceless; most people don’t remember the actual content of any Betty Boop cartoons, just the boop oop a doop catchphrase. Her lasting image is purely that of a sex symbol – she dresses risque, says very little, and never ages. And who wouldn’t want to be married to the original sex symbol?
Wow, That Guy Really Loves His Wife
Alec Robbins is thrilled that he’s married to Betty Boop. He’s gotta tell the guys at work about this! In Book I: Mr Boop, we meet a man who is ecstatic, yet paralysed by the fact that he is married to Betty Boop. The Betty Boop. He tells his co-workers at Subway, the bartender, the divorce lawyer (just to say that he would never want to divorce his wife, which is completely normal behaviour).
In an interview with The Strip Club, Alec (in full commitment to the bit) says that he is writing what he assumes Betty is thinking; there’s no evidence of collaboration with his wife, her voice is only portrayed via the male protagonist. We don’t know what Betty does for a living, how she and Alec met, or if she even has any friends. All we know about Betty is that she is Alec’s wife, and boy does he love his wife. From his perspective, we end up learning very little about Betty. He makes the decisions, such as the decision to have a threesome with Bugs Bunny, and we just have to believe that Betty is on board. Much like Betty Boop’s real-life persona, her voice has been taken, and she is now just a symbol of desire.
The concept of Betty as a symbol without her own free will comes into play in Book III: Cease + Exist. The main plot of the series is that Betty Boop’s father wants her back to make more cartoons, and insists that she divorces her husband, else he’ll go to jail. Betty is stuck between two men: an overly controlling father who wishes to monetise and capitalise on the fantasy of Betty Boop, and a man who is only in love with the idea of Betty Boop. Even though we’re told that Betty loves her husband, it’s clear that there are no good options for her.
Alec and Betty divorce, the comic dissolves, and we meet the real Mr Boop. Alec Robbins is just a guy who started a comic strip because he thought it’d be funny to write about how he was married to Betty Boop. Now that the comic is over, he can go about his day to day life.
Book IV: Mr Boop deals with Alec in a post-Betty life, and his burgeoning romance with Liz. What starts out as a charming pandemic relationship gradually becomes psychological horror akin to Ira Levin. Alec starts accidentally calling Liz Betty, then the universe starts to shift. Alec begins to shrink, the backgrounds gradually become less detailed, and the speech becomes more stylised. Instead of talking like normal people, Liz says that Alec is the “hottest person [she] knows!!! and [he’s] really strong and smart!!” in a speech pattern similar to the earlier volumes. Despite having watched their entire relationship bloom, we still know very little about Liz, other than she occasionally talks to her Nonna (and therefore may have some Italian descent), and likes the Mr Boop comic. What does she do for a living? Does she have any friends? What’s her favourite colour? Ultimately all of this is irrelevant because she’s not a person, she’s a symbol.
“Why are you changing what I say in the comic?” asks Liz, trying to fight back against the inevitable, but it’s too late. Soon, Liz gets a short curly Betty Boop-esque haircut, starts wearing a tube dress and insists that she is now called Betty. Much like The Stepford Wives, Liz’s transformation into Alec’s dream girl ties into a fear countless women have when entering relationships with men: that they are not his equal, they are simply an image for the man to project his fantasies onto.
Following a viewing of Elizabethtown, film critic Nathan Rabin invented the phrase “Manic Pixie Daydream Girl”, to describe a stock character of a woman who exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures. Natalie Portman in Garden State, and Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown are key examples. Almost as soon as the trope was coined, it started to get deconstructed in films like 500 Days Of Summer and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. “Too many guys think I’m a concept,” says Clementine in Eternal Sunshine, “or I complete them, or I’m gonna make them alive”. In both films, the main character eventually learns nothing from his heartbreaking experience with a MPDG. Both Tom and Joel acknowledge that they’ve projected too much onto their romantic interests, and they both immediately fall straight back into the cycle.
In Mr Boop, however, it seems that the male protagonist actually learns from this. Following the Boopification of Liz, he is entered back into his fantasy world where he’s married to Betty Boop and they’re both really happy about it. He loves his wife, and she’s thrilled! They have amazing sex, and his coworkers at Quiznos, Bugs Bunny and Peter Griffin, are insanely jealous, But ultimately, it’s not real. Following a mental breakdown from Bugs Bunny, Alec acknowledges that he has to let go.
Both the original Betty Boop oeuvre and the Mr Boop comics are stories about narrative. Throughout history, men have been given the narrative control of stories that are told. In Lolita Podcast, writer and podcaster Jamie Loftus discussed the history of Lolita and laments that through history, the story of Dolores Haze has been lost, and only the male constructed image of Lolita remains. Similarly, Betty Boop’s history and character has been forgotten to time – all that remains is kitschy souvenirs and merchandise. Liz’s narrative was taken from her and morphed into an idealised unattainable dream girl. Ultimately, Robbins has created a feminist text in which he deconstructs the Manic Pixie Dream Girl and male ownership of female stories.
Also, he really loves his wife.
